Humankind
Page 24
De Blok sums up his philosophy like this: ‘It’s easy to make things hard, but hard to make them easy.’ The record clearly shows that managers prefer the complicated. ‘Because that makes your job more interesting,’ de Blok explains. ‘That lets you say: See, you need me to master that complexity.’
Could it be that’s also driving a big part of our so-called ‘knowledge economy’? That pedigree managers and consultants make simple things as complicated as possible so we will need them to steer us through all the complexity? Sometimes I secretly think this is the revenue model of not only Wall Street bankers but also postmodern philosophers peddling incomprehensible jargon. Both make simple things impossibly complex.
Jos de Blok does the opposite: he opts for simplicity. While healthcare conferences feature highly paid trend-watchers auguring disruption and innovation, he believes it’s more important to preserve what works. ‘The world benefits more from continuity than from continual change,’ he asserts. ‘Now they’ve got change managers, change agents, and so forth, but when I look at actual care in the community, the job has scarcely changed in thirty years. You need to build a relationship with someone in a tough situation; that’s a constant. Sure, you may add some new insights and techniques, but the basics haven’t changed.’
What does need to change, De Blok will tell you, is the care system. In recent decades, healthcare has been colonised by lawyers. ‘Now you’re in opposing camps. One side sells, the other buys. Just last week I was at a hospital where they told me: We have our own sales team now. It’s crazy! We have hospitals with commercial departments and procurement teams, all staffing people with no background in healthcare at all. One buys, the other sells, and neither have a clue what it’s all about.’
All the while, the bureaucracy keeps proliferating, because when you turn healthcare into a market, you end up with piles of paperwork. ‘Nobody trusts anybody else, so they start building in all these safeguards; all kinds of checks that result in a ton of red tape. It’s downright absurd,’ says De Blok. ‘The number of consultants and administrators at insurance companies is growing, while the number of actual caregivers continues to shrink.’
De Blok advocates a radically different approach to healthcare funding. Scrap the product mentality, he says. Make care central again. Drastically simplify the costs. ‘The simpler the billing, the greater the emphasis on actual care,’ he explains. ‘The more complicated the billing, the more players will search for loopholes in the system, increasingly tipping the balance towards accounting departments until they’re the ones defining care.’
Talking to Jos de Blok, it soon becomes clear that his lessons go beyond the care sector. They apply to other areas, too: to education and law enforcement, to government and industry.
A great example is FAVI, a French firm that supplies car parts. When Jean-François Zobrist was appointed its new CEO in 1983, FAVI had a rigid hierarchy structure and still did things the old-fashioned way. Work hard, you’ll get a bonus. Clock in late, your wages will be docked.
From day one, Zobrist imagined an organisation in which not he, but his staff made the decisions. Where employees felt it their duty to arrive on time (and where you could be certain that if they didn’t, they had a good reason). ‘I dreamed of a place,’ Zobrist recounted later, ‘that everyone would treat like home. Nothing more, nothing less.’21
His first act as CEO was to brick up the huge window that let management keep an eye on the whole shop floor. Next he binned the time clock, had the locks taken off the storage rooms and axed the bonus system. Zobrist split the company into ‘mini-factories’ of twenty-five to thirty employees and had them each choose their own team leader. To these he gave free rein to make all their own decisions: on wages, working hours, who to hire, and all the rest. Each team answered directly to their customers.
Zobrist also decided not to replace the firm’s old managers when they retired, and cut out the HR, planning and marketing departments. FAVI switched to a ‘reverse delegation’ method of working, in which teams did everything on their own, unless they themselves wanted to call in management.
This may sound like the recipe for a money-guzzling hippy commune, but in fact productivity at FAVI went up. The company workforce expanded from one hundred to five hundred and it went on to conquer 50 per cent of the market for transmission forks. Average production times for key parts dropped from eleven days to just one. And while competitors were forced to relocate operations to low-wage countries, the FAVI plant stayed put in Europe.22
All that time, Zobrist’s philosophy was dead simple. If you treat employees as if they are responsible and reliable, they will be. He even wrote a book about it, subtitled: L’entreprise qui croit que l’homme est bon. Translation: ‘The company that believes people are good.’
5
Companies like Buurtzorg and FAVI are proof that everything changes when you exchange suspicion for a more positive view of human nature.
Skill and competence become the leading values, not revenue or productivity. Just imagine what this would mean in other jobs and professions. CEOs would take the helm out of faith in their companies, academics would burn the midnight oil out of a thirst for knowledge, teachers would teach because they feel responsible for their students, psychologists would treat only as long as their patients require and bankers would derive satisfaction from the services they render.
Of course, there are already scores of teachers and bankers, academics and managers who are passionately motivated to help others. Not, however, because of the labyrinths of targets, rules, and procedures, but despite them.
Edward Deci, the American psychologist who flipped the script on how we think about motivation, thought the question should no longer be how to motivate others, but how we shape a society so that people motivate themselves. This question is neither conservative nor progressive, neither capitalist nor communist. It speaks to a new movement–a new realism. Because nothing is more powerful than people who do something because they want to do it.
14
Homo ludens
1
For days after my conversation with Jos de Blok, my mind kept coming back to the same question: what if the whole of society was based on trust?
To pull off a U-turn of this magnitude, we’d have to start at the beginning, I thought. We’d have to start with kids. But when I dived into the educational literature, I soon came up against a few harsh facts. Over the past decades, the intrinsic motivation of children has been systematically stifled. Adults have been filling children’s time with homework, athletics, music, drama, tutoring, exam practice–the list of activities seems endless. That means less time for that one other activity: play. And then I mean play in the broadest sense–the freedom to go wherever curiosity leads. To search and to discover, to experiment and to create. Not along any lines set out by parents or teachers, but just because. For the fun of it.
Everywhere you look, children’s freedom is being limited.1 In 1971, 80 per cent of British seven- and eight-year-olds still walked to school on their own. These days it’s a mere 10 per cent. A recent poll among twelve thousand parents in ten countries revealed that prison inmates spend more time outdoors than most kids.2 Researchers at the University of Michigan found the time kids spent at school increased by 18 per cent from 1981 to 1997. Time spent on homework went up 145 per cent.3
Sociologists and psychologists alike have expressed alarm at these developments. One long-term American study found a diminishing ‘internal locus of control’ among children, meaning they increasingly feel their lives are being determined by others. In the US, this shift has been so seismic that in 2002 the average child felt less ‘in control’ than 80 per cent of kids did in the 1960s.4
Though these figures are less dramatic in my own country, the trend is the same. In 2018, Dutch researchers found that three in ten kids play outside either once a week or not at all.5 A large study carried out by the OECD (the global think tank) among school kids, m
eanwhile, revealed that those in Holland are the least motivated of all countries surveyed. Tests and report cards have so blunted their intrinsic motivation that their attention evaporates when faced with an ungraded assignment.6
And that’s to say nothing of the biggest shift of all: parents spending much more time with their kids. Time to read. Time to help out with homework. Time to take them to sports practice. In the Netherlands, the amount of time spent on parenting these days is over 150 per cent more than in the 1980s.7 In the US, working mothers spend more time with their kids today than stay-at-home mothers did in the 1970s.8
Why? What’s behind this shift? It’s not as if parents suddenly gained oceans of time. On the contrary, since the 1980s parents everywhere have been working harder. Maybe that’s the key: our fixation on work at the expense of everything else. As education policymakers began pushing rankings and growth, parents and schools became consumed with testing and results.
Kids are now being categorised at an ever younger age. Between those with heaps of ability and promise, and those with less. Parents worry: is my daughter being challenged enough? Is my son keeping up with his peers? Will they be accepted into a university? A recent study among 10,000 American students revealed that 80 per cent think their parents are more concerned about good grades than qualities like compassion and kindness.9
At the same time there’s a widespread sense that something valuable is slipping away. Such as spontaneity. And playfulness. As a parent, you’re bombarded with tips on how to steel yourself and your child against the pressures to achieve. There’s a whole genre on how to work less and be more mindful. But what if a little self-help doesn’t cut it?
To better understand what’s going on, we need to define what we mean by play. Play is not subject to fixed rules and regulations, but is open-ended and unfettered. It’s not an Astroturfed field with parents shouting at the sidelines; it’s kids frolicking outside without parental supervision, making up their own games as they go along.
When kids engage in this kind of play, they think for themselves. They take risks and colour outside the lines, and in the process train their minds and motivation. Unstructured play is also nature’s remedy against boredom. These days we give kids all kinds of manufactured entertainment, from the LEGO® Star Wars Snowspeeder™, complete with detailed assembly instructions, to the Miele Kitchen Gourmet Deluxe with electronic cooking sounds.
The question is, if everything comes prefabricated, can we still cultivate our own curiosity and powers of imagination?10 Boredom may be the wellspring of creativity. ‘You can’t teach creativity,’ writes psychologist Peter Gray, ‘all you can do is let it blossom.’11
Among biologists, there’s consensus that the instinct to play is rooted deep in our nature. Almost all mammals play, and many other animals also can’t resist. Ravens in Alaska love whizzing down snow-covered rooftops.12 On a beach in Australia, crocodiles have been spied surfing the waves for kicks, and Canadian scientists have observed octopuses firing water jets at empty medicine bottles.13
On the face of it, play may seem like a pretty pointless use of time. But the fascinating thing is that it’s the most intelligent animals that exhibit the most playful behaviour. In Chapter 3 we saw that domesticated animals play their whole lives. What’s more, no other species enjoys a childhood as long as Homo puppy. Play gives meaning to life, wrote the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga back in 1938. He christened us Homo ludens–‘playing man’. Everything we call ‘culture,’ said Huizinga, originates in play.14
Anthropologists suspect that for most of human history children were permitted to play as much as they pleased. Considerable though the differences between individual hunter-gatherer cultures may be, the culture of play looks very similar across the board.15 Most significant of all, say researchers, is the immense freedom afforded to youngsters. Since nomads rarely feel they can dictate child development, kids are allowed to play all day long, from early in the morning until late into the night.
But are children equipped for life as an adult if they never go to school? The answer is that, in these societies, playing and learning are one and the same. Toddlers don’t need tests or grades to learn to walk or talk. It comes to them naturally, because they’re keen to explore the world. Likewise, hunter-gatherer children learn through play. Catching insects, making bows and arrows, imitating animal calls–there’s so much to do in the jungle. And survival requires tremendous knowledge of plants and animals.
Equally, by playing together children learn to cooperate. Hunter-gatherer kids almost always play in mixed groups, with boys and girls and all ages together. Little kids learn from the big kids, who feel a responsibility to pass on what they know. Not surprisingly, competitive games are virtually unheard of in these societies.16 Unlike adult tournaments, unstructured play continually requires participants to make compromises. And if anyone’s unhappy, they can always stop (but then the fun ends for everyone).
2
The culture of play underwent a radical change when humans started settling down in one place.
For children, the dawn of civilisation brought the yoke of mind-numbing farm labour, as well as the idea that children required raising, much like one might raise tomatoes. Because if children were born wicked, then you couldn’t leave them to their own devices. They first needed to acquire that veneer of civilisation, and often this called for a firm hand. The notion that parents should ever strike a child originated only recently, among our agrarian and city-dwelling ancestors.17
With the emergence of the first cities and states came the first education systems. The Church needed pious followers, the army loyal soldiers and the government hard workers. Play was the enemy, all three agreed. ‘Neither do we allow any time for play,’ dictated the English cleric John Wesley (1703–91) in the rules he established for his schools. ‘He that plays when he is a boy, will play when he is a man.’18
Not until the nineteenth century was religious education supplanted by state systems in which, in the words of one historian, ‘a French minister of education could boast that, as it was 10:20 a.m., he knew exactly which passage of Cicero all students of a certain form throughout France would be studying’.19 Good citizenship had to be drilled into people from an early age, and those citizens also had to learn to love their country. France, Italy and Germany had all been traced out on the map; now it was time to forge Frenchmen, Italians and Germans.20
During the Industrial Revolution, a large portion of manufacturing drudgery was relegated to machines. (Not everywhere, of course–in Bangladesh kids still work sewing machines to produce our bargains.) That changed the aim of education. Now, children had to learn to read and write, to design and organise so that they could pay their own way when they were adults.
Not until the late nineteenth century did children once again have more time to play. Historians call this period the ‘golden age’ of unstructured play, when child labour was banned and parents increasingly left kids to themselves.21 In many neighbourhoods in Europe and North America no one even bothered to keep an eye on them, and kids simply roamed free most of the day.
These golden days were short-lived, however, as from the 1980s onward life grew progressively busier, in the workplace and the classroom. Individualism and the culture of achievement gained precedence. Families grew smaller and parents began to worry whether their progeny would make the grade.
Kids who were too playful now might even be sent to a doctor. In recent decades, diagnoses of behavioural disorders have increased exponentially, of which perhaps the best example is ADHD. This is the only disorder, I once heard a psychiatrist remark, that’s seasonal: what seems insignificant over summer vacation requires more than a few kids to be dosed on Ritalin when schools start again.22
Granted, we’re a lot less strict with kids today than we were a hundred years ago, and schools are no longer the prisons they resembled in the nineteenth century. Kids who behave badly don’t get a slap, but a pill. Schools no l
onger indoctrinate, but teach a more diverse curriculum than ever, transferring as much knowledge to students as possible so they’ll find well-paying jobs in the ‘knowledge economy’.
Education has become something to be endured. A new generation is coming up that’s internalising the rules of our achievement-based society. It’s a generation that’s learning to run a rat race where the main metrics of success are your résumé and your pay cheque. A generation less inclined to colour outside the lines, less inclined to dream or to dare, to fantasise or explore. A generation, in short, that’s forgetting how to play.
3
Is there another way?
Could we go back to a society with more room for freedom and creativity?
Could we build playgrounds and design schools that don’t constrain but, rather, unchain our need to play?
The answer is yes, and yes, and yes.
Carl Theodor Sørensen, a Danish landscape architect, had already designed quite a few playgrounds before realising they bored kids senseless. Sandboxes, slides, swings… the average playground is a bureaucrat’s dream and a child’s nightmare. Little wonder, Sørensen thought, that kids prefer to play in junkyards and building sites.
This inspired him to design something completely new at the time: a playground without rules or safety regulations. A place where kids themselves are in charge.
In 1943, in the midst of the German occupation, Sørensen tested his idea in the Copenhagen suburb of Emdrup. He filled a 75,000-square-foot lot with broken-down cars, firewood and old tyres. Children could smash, bang and tinker with hammers, chisels and screwdrivers. They could climb trees and build fires, dig pits and make huts. Or, as Sørensen later put it: they could ‘dream and imagine and make dreams and imagination reality’.23